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Each year in New Zealand there are around 32,000 workplace injuries, and around 65 are fatal. Environmental services company EnviroNZ is an example of a business that faces multiple health and safety challenges every day.
EnviroNZ focuses on material management and resource recovery. They are 'committed to managing, recovering and processing waste streams to deliver sustainable outcomes'. Health and safety plays a huge part in the business and is a "constant focus," Chris Augthton, CEO of EnviroNZ says.
In the last year alone, there have been four close calls at EnviroNZ's resource recovery site on Auckland's North Shore. “We have strong controls to protect people on our sites but we’re always working on how we can take it to the next level,” Aughton explains.
The waste disposal site operates with heavy machinery and up to 300 visitors daily. Although the site has extensive health and safety measures such as signage, barriers, and points people to direct traffic and look for hazards, visitors still get too close to machinery.
“People come in, they get a bit distracted and as they are perhaps removing some of their products they're trying to throw into the tip, they can drop things. We've seen people drop mobile phones, right through to broken brooms,” Aughton says.
In these moments, visitors forget the risk they are putting themselves in by entering restricted zones and are more focused on retrieving their personal belongings. Although the EnviroNZ site have staff to watch out for times like these, and are able to shut down machines if need be, they admittedly “can’t see everything.”
This got EnviroNZ thinking about how technology could help and so began their partnership with Qrious. Qrious was challenged by EnviroNZ to "develop a cutting edge AI solution that could make our site safer by enabling us to anticipate and react immediately if someone bypasses our safety controls” Aughton explains.
Qrious worked with EnviroNZ to develop a hazard detection system using AI, which is used for monitoring and alerting about potential health and safety incidents on site.
Using computer vision and IoT (Internet of Things) video cameras, the AI system identifies and tracks people and excavators within a specified detection zone and calculates distances between them. The system is based on video from existing cameras at the EnvironNZ site, with the connectivity from Spark’s low latency, high bandwidth 5G network, and local edge computing using AWS Snowball Edge.
The system records the interactions for later analysis in EnviroNZ’s business intelligence environment. Here the videos from multiple cameras are ingested, processed, and logged in real time. The system also has a digital alert system for flagging and storing potential hazards which are identified.
Even though this is the first time such an advanced system has been deployed on a waste management site in New Zealand, Qrious was able to stand up the initial solution in just a few weeks.
The hazard detection system has been running as a pilot for the last six months and is already a gamechanger. The results have been so successful that the business is now exploring extending the trial to a second site. “We’re hugely enthusiastic about the ability of this technology to alert our team to an incident as it is happening so we can instantly respond. We’re now looking to test it in different site situations,” Aughton says.
Not only is the site measured in real time, but the data generated by the system is fed into a Power BI Tool that EnviroNZ can use to investigate new processes, make continual improvements, and identify any focus areas for training. As more data is collected over time, EnviroNZ will be able to see trends in events and track any changes.
There are even more possibilities for the system as the multi class object detection, which currently tracks excavators and people, can be expanded to recognise more objects. The system also has capability to sound audible alarms, visual alarms, or even deactivate heavy machinery when there is a health and safety issue.
The always on system gives peace of mind that visitors and staff will remain safe. As Aughton says, "it's another set of eyes, it doesn't get tired, it doesn't get fatigued, it doesn't get distracted, and it's vigilant and it's always on.”
"We really see this as enhancing all the systems we've got on site."
